Webinar: Successful CMMS Implementation

Craig will take you through 8 critical steps to ensure successful implementation. Learn how to successfully implement and utilize your new CMMS.

Webinar Transcription

This is Craig Shepard as I said. I’m going to talk about eight steps to a successful CMMS implementation. MicroMain as you can see from our slide is headquartered in Austin Texas, and we’ve been providing maintenance software since 1991. So we’ve had quite a bit of experience in implementing and managing maintenance software.

We offer maintenance management software as well as CAFM and space planning as well. We have customers as diverse as from manufacturing to healthcare, property management, stadiums, so we are in many, many different types of organizations.

Implementing a new CMMS. Today, we’re going to review what we call best practices in use and implementation process and provide you with some steps to ensure you have a successful implementation as well. And then now, we’re going to show you actually some of the MicroMain programs, and we can discuss things that you can do. And again if you have questions, save them, and you can get on the chat.

When you’re reviewing a CMMS, and this is whether or not you have one already or if you’re just now starting to look for one. The first thing you really need to do is define your goals. What are you trying to get out of having a maintenance software package? Is it just simply to schedule PMs and make sure you’re doing preventive maintenance to all of your equipment? Do you want to track work orders and PMs? Are you trying to maintain proper part levels, because you find that you are always running out of parts, and therefore you have downtime in equipment while you’re waiting for parts to be delivered?

There’s a lot of different reasons to have a CMMS, and you need to define those first, so that way you then know what your expectations are. What you are going to get out of it? Is it going to decrease your labor costs? Are you going to decrease your parts that are on hand? Will you extend your asset life, because now you’re doing scheduled maintenance? Again, you need to define your goals, figure out what your expectations are. Additionally, you need to figure out what your system configuration is? What kind of hardware you need? What kind of software can your organization support? That’s important.

You don’t want to go spend a lot of time implementing, not implementing, but I should say reviewing CMMS programs only to find out that your IT department does not support it. That’s why MicroMain, by the way, supports both or has both a on-premise as well as a hosted solution, so we can meet either one of these needs if you don’t have IT staff that wants to support it or maybe they’re just not capable of supporting it. We can host it for you. We offer it both ways.

You also want to consider what kind of training that you’ll need, just so that you’ll have a successful implementation. Probably, the number one reason that most CMMS implementations fail is because when it came time to purchase the training and get the training, people either decided they didn’t need it, they were going to go it alone or they didn’t really plan an adequate training for all the people who might be using or the different groups that may be using the program. We will talk about that. At the end of the day, obviously, you need to choose a maintenance program that’s going to meet your requirements.

All right. Why would you even need a maintenance management software? And as I mentioned before, a few of the reasons. You want to manage your work orders. You want to make sure there’s an orderly flow of not only how do the work orders come in, but then how are they managed. Do they have to be approved? Do they have to be assigned? What is your flow of work? What happens once they are assigned? Are they assigned to a shop first, and then there’s a shop, then give them to the proper labor or maybe to the proper vendors? And then what happens once it gets to them? Are they going to close them out themselves? Maybe they’re going to use handheld.

MicroMain offers a mobile CMMS solution that allows all your maintenance techs access and do and complete all their work on any browser-based device. Do you want that to be part of your CMMS? Again, you want to consider, what do you want to do with regard to creating and executing those work orders? Who’s issuing them? Who’s closing them out? Who has authorization to do what? You also want to consider your PMs. What are you trying to accomplish by setting up preventative routine maintenance inspections. Typically, you want to have, again, some sort of an orderly scheduled where you know that these things are going to come due, whether it’s monthly, weekly, quarterly, annually or possibly by meter. We support all of those. But again, what does it do for you? Hopefully, it’s going to extend the life of your equipment if you do scheduled maintenance.

In MicroMain, assets are anything you’re going to do maintenance to. So whether it’s buildings or rooms or offices or equipment, grounds, anything of that nature, you want to identify what you have. What is it you want to do maintenance to, and then what do you hope to achieve by doing maintenance to those? What are you going to be reporting on?

I mentioned earlier, also, you want to be able to manage your inventory. One, do you have the appropriate levels of inventory? Do you have too much obsolete inventory that’s just sitting there, that hasn’t been used? Do you have the proper parts on hand, so that when you have PMs coming up, and you go out to service it, you have the parts that you need to do your maintenance? Obviously, if you don’t have those parts, there’s the downtime on equipment. And if you happen to be a production-oriented manufacturing, that’s the worst ever news from production. Again, you want to manage your parts, make sure that you have everything that’s necessary.

And in MicroMain, you can set up all your parts, you can keep track of all your use, you can setup min, max for your order amounts, have alerts triggered that say, “It’s time to reorder parts.” That way, you always know what you need. You want to look when you’re evaluating a maintenance software or looking at your own. Do you have a purchase order capability? And not only do you have purchase order capability, but do you have any kind of an alert with it that tells you that not only is it time to purchase these parts and replenish your supplies, but have those POs come in yet or are they past due?

So a good CMMS that you’re looking at should be able to do that, and if you have one in place right now, that’s something you may want to make sure it’s set up on it. So that you have time recreation of those POs, and not only time recreation, but also that they come in on time.

Inspections, that goes back to PMs. You can set up inspections. You may want to just go out and do a property inspection and pass and fail it. And then what do you do if you pass it and fail it? Do you have corrective maintenance work order capability right on that inspection? Perhaps in those inspections, there’s things like pressure, and temperature, and amps, and volts or things of that nature. You may want to have that all set up, so that you can go out and take those readings. And if they are out of range, you can correct them. You can log them. You can run reports and graphs by those readings. So you might run a monthly report that says, “I want to see all my temperature readings.”

Those are things you may want to consider as you’re looking at or setting up your own CMMS. How do I go about doing this? Is this something that’s important to me? You may want to manage fleet, and then long term, you want to create reports, so you can get the data out that you need.

I have a quick slide here if everyone would just take a second. What is your primary concern if you would please just…I’ll give you a few seconds to fill that out. Five, four, three, two, one, and we will skip to the results here. I was curious who my audience is. We have work order management, response to corrective maintenance, and reporting on maintenance activities and PMs. It looks like primarily we want people here want to know about their PMs, work order management, into a lesser extent, your preventative maintenance.

Again, when you are evaluating CMMS, again, whether you are looking for one or whether you have one in place, you want to look at these two feature and see what is the capability of our work order management. What is the workflow? You identify it. Maybe here’s what we do now, what would we like to do in the future? Can this CMMS support what we would like to do? And same thing with PMs, can it support our workflow or are we going to perhaps maybe have to alter ours a little bit into the CMMS? Again, those are important considerations when you’re stetting things up.

My current maintenance process, one more slide here. Are you using a CMMS? Are you considering a change? Do you have a homegrown system? Are you not using a CMMS at all? We’ll give you a quick moment here to respond if you would. Five, four, three, two, one, and most of you it looks like are using a CMMS already, and just a few of you here are looking at perhaps changing. Again, we have a good cross-section, but since most of you have a CMMS obviously, we’re looking at what’s the best way to have a successful implementation and to make sure not only to have it successful, but also to review it, and we’ll talk about that.

The CMMS implementation process, you want to identify your needs, research, and contact vendors again. Most of you already have one, but for those of you who are out looking again, identify your needs. We talked about that. What are your primary goals in looking for a new CMMS? Why are you looking to leave your old one? Was it functionality? Was it that it was too difficult to use? Could you not get the reports out that you needed? Again, be very specific, so that when you are talking to someone, new vendors, you can tell them this. It’s important for them to know what you’re looking for? What failed in your old implementation that is causing you to go our and look again? So again, identify those needs, research, schedule web demos.

I think pretty much everyone does that. So a professional can take you through the program, start to finish, and answer all the questions that you need, to make sure it meets your needs. And then obviously, you choose that vendor, and then you have to prepare for your implementation. That means you have to gather all the information that you need to put in. Typically, if you’re going to have a successful implementation, that step is going to be part of your training and your services. If you have scheduled some sort of…whether it’s online consultation or perhaps you have someone on-site, that allows you to adequately gather all the information that you need to put into your CMMS or maybe we’re going to do a data conversion from another program.

Again, you want to analyze that, make sure that your data is complete and that you have everything you need, so that you can start utilizing the program effectively and more importantly, get the reports out at the end of the day. Because again, it’s always data in and data out. So if you put it incorrectly, you can get the right reports out.

Once you prepare for it, obviously, you start to implement it. On the implementation stage, obviously, you’re going to start utilizing the program. Make sure that you have everything set up and assigned correctly. And then it’s always important to review. Are you using the most current version? Are your processes done well? Are you getting out the information that you want? You got to take a look at those reports and see, “Are we getting what we need?”

So let’s look at this, what they call the eight steps here. First, as I mentioned, take inventory, do your homework, review what you have. Are you one property? Are you multiple properties? Are you one plant, multiple plants? Are you a hospital with three buildings? Are you a property management company with 10 properties that you’re managing essentially? What equipment do you want to do maintenance to? Is it only critical equipment or is it production equipment or perhaps if you’re manufacturing, you are doing both facilities in production? Do you want to manage parts? Do you have a parts inventory?

Labor, that’s all the people who are going to do anything for you. So that is all your own staff and all your vendors. Are they assigned to trades? Are they assigned to shops? Do you have certifications and trainings? Do you want to track their wage rates, so that you can run cost reports as to what it’s costing you to maintain your facilities? Are you managing vehicles? If so, does the CMMS that you’re looking at or using have any kind of special fleet management capability? So again, that’s all the stuff that you need to do.

Take an inventory of what it is you want, and then consider any unique situation to yourself. Maybe you are a healthcare facility, you need to do a risk assessment of your equipment. MicroMain offers a healthcare version. Consider you are a food company, and that before you move on from any PM, there’s certain things that need to be done. Can these steps be included in all of your work orders and PMs? So again, you need to consider any unique situations to yourself.

And as it says right here, many CMMS implementations fail, because the database is improperly set up to manage daily activities and report. That is really a true fact that when we talk to all of our customers, typically, when they tell us that they’re not getting what they want, it’s usually because on the front end, they didn’t spend enough time setting it up correctly.

Number two, outline critical PMs. Schedule your PMs. Keep your equipment up and running. In MicroMain, you can set up all your PMs as I mentioned. Any frequency including meter based, you can, of course, have an auto scheduler, so it just automatically schedules your PMs. They appear on the main page where you manage everything. You can pre-assign them, so you need to know. Do you have your PM set up somewhere? Maybe you have documents from the manufacturer that you want to attach.

A good CMMS will allow you to attach all your documents. If you want to use the mobile application, MicroMain’s Mobile even allows you to attach those documents on the mobile module. Do you have inspections that you want to setup with readings and measurements? Do you want to have pass and fail, take those readings? Do you want to be able to create corrective maintenance work orders? Of course, as I mentioned, MicroMain can allow you to do that. At the end of the day, when you set up all your PMs, they’re going to reduce your failures and emergencies, because you’re doing regular maintenance, and you’re also going to increase the life of your asset. And those are really the two primary goals of having a PM and inspections in any maintenance management software.

Three, as I mentioned earlier, consult with your IT department. As it says here, even if you implement a host of solutions, make sure you have the bandwidth. There’s nothing worse than saying, “Well, we’re going to outsource it. We’re going to have a hosted solution,” and you don’t have the bandwidth to support it. Your access to it is only as good as your internet connection. So if it’s hosted, and you have a very, very slow small pipeline, so to speak, you got to consider that. Because it’s not going to react the way you want it to. So again, consult with IT, determine what you have, whether it’s necessarily to support it, whether it’s on-premise or hosted, and then who is going to support the various issues. Very important.

I mentioned earlier, prepare your data. Make sure you know what’s going into that program. If you’re coming from another program, clean it up before you import it. You make sure it’s accurate. Make sure the data fields are correct. Make sure you don’t have a lot of illegal characters. A lot of these databases have…they can be very particular about what you can put in. They don’t include a lot of characters other than letters and numbers. So make sure that you have proper data, so everything’s clean. Make sure it’s up to date. As it says, consult with your vendor.

We can add a significant value, because we’ve done this time and time and time again. We have departments dedicated to helping you prepare your data, helping you import. So this will, again, ensure a successful implementation if you make sure that the data going in is correct. Make sure that all your equipment has the information you need. If having your manufacturer serial number, groups and warranty information, and all that at your fingertips, it’s important to make sure that’s in there, and that it’s put in properly.

Test the system before you go live. Before you just start using it, you want to test it. You want to have basically your sample of database, not your production database, and you want to go in, and you want to test it and make sure that things are up and running, everything is connected, so that when you create a work order and you add your labor, and your parts, and your other costs, and this and that and the other, you seek and see where everything is going to, and that’s it’s properly set up.

It’s very difficult to go back later on and say, “Jeez, we didn’t do it right or all the stuff is not working.” It can be done. We do consults all the time to help you improve it, but it is nothing like setting it up and testing it before you can actually go live. A lot of people, they get it. They install it. They just start putting stuff in and going forward. It sounds it like it could be really pretty common place to say, “Yeah, we’re going to test everything,” but a lot of people do not. They just jump in with both feet and start going before they test it and make sure they’re getting that they need.

Number six, determine your reporting needs. As I mentioned, at the end of day, you buy your maintenance program to automate your processes, to make sure everything’s in place. But at the end of the day, you want to be allowed to get out those proper reports. Determine on the front end what you need, because the types of reports that you need will determine what information you put in as you’re setting it up. And it’s going to just also determine how you’re running it. And as it mentions here, you want to get input from your staff, and your managers, and accounting. So again, think about those reports. Configure the system in a way that you’re going to get out that information.

Mean time between failure of your production facilities, and mean time between failure is important to you. Make sure that you put in those failure codes, so that you can then assign those failure codes. And at the end of the day, get those reports. If you’re doing inspections, and you want to rate the condition of a property, maybe you’re doing a walk on the property, and you want to look at all the various components, and you want to access it, make sure that those rating systems are put in on the front end in order to get those reports out on the back end. So again, determine what your reporting needs are, and that way, you can set up not only what information, but a lot of times what your process is going to be.

I mentioned earlier successful implementation, probably one of the most important…get training. A lot of times people will but the software, and at that point, they say, “Well, I know about this. I can do it myself.” Improperly trained or no training at all is honestly the death of a CMMS for you unless you’re really, really good. Having someone be able to not only help you out with setup and implementation, but also training, so that you have all your groups trained, your key personnel who know the system inside and out.

Maybe you have a group who’s only using the work request modules. Maybe you have a group trained that’s only using the handheld modules. Perhaps you have some parts guys who are only using the parts portion of it. Figure out who needs to be trained, how much training they need. We can help you with that and make sure that you have proper training. And you may also want to consider a future training. At MicroMain, we offer a lot of online follow up CMMS training. For instance, we might have an online setup data consult on the front end, and then come out to your side or have you come to our side for a comprehensive training and then follow it up in three to six months to say, “Okay, how are we doing? Let’s take the pulse and make sure that things are going according to plan.”

But again, make sure you’re getting the most out of your maintenance program and take advantage of training. And any good CMMS provider will provide you with a lot of training options.

Last, audit your CMMS. Take the pulse at the end of the year, at the end of the quarter or however often you want. As I mentioned, make sure it’s doing what you want. Can I get those reports that I want? I want to look at budgets, actual versus budgeted for my categories of how much am I spending on each back or plumbing or I want to look at how much…am I able to get out reports to show how many work orders my guys are doing on time versus late? So again, if those are important to you, you need to audit it, make sure that you’re getting out those types of reports.

Also, of course, as I mentioned, make sure you’re on the latest version of the software. We’re always updating the software, and you might as well make sure typically you have support. Support provides you with tech support and all upgrades. So you might as well make sure that you are getting the latest version. So you take advantage of anything new that’s coming out or being added to it. Also, make sure you’re utilizing the software’s capabilities. I have many customers who will call me a year or two down the line and say, “Hey, does this do PMs?” And it’s astounding to me, but it happens all the time or “Hey, does this do work orders too? We are only using PMs,” or “Can you manage parts with this?”

Call your CMMS company and go through it again, say, “Here’s what we’re doing. Am I using everything?” Do an audit of what you’re using, and make sure you’re utilizing the full software capabilities. So again, you should do that minimum once a year. Also, you want to check with the users and periodically, see if they have questions. You train them and you assume that they’re all fine and up and running. You need to check with them periodically to make sure that they understand what they’re doing, that they understand what is required of them, what’s expected of them, and that they know how to use it as well.So again, performing those periodic audits are going to protect your investment, maximize your savings of your organization, and ensure that you’re using a maintenance software to its full extent.

Again, these are the eight steps we just talked about; take inventory, outline your PMs, consult with IT, then prepare that data, make sure you’re getting the right staff in there, test it first before you go live, determine your reporting needs, make sure you’re getting the right reports out, don’t forget about training, and then audit it to make sure that you are doing everything correctly and getting everything that you can out of it. Essentially, that is it.

I will just for a moment just share the actual MicroMain application. I always like to give you a quick look at what the application looks like. The MicroMain program opens up with a dashboard initially, and you can open it on any view. Again, it’s a way for you to monitor what’s going on, get the most out of it, so you can have various dashboard items just to see how you’re doing.

Here, I have 11 requested, 9 opened. I have 18 past due. I’m not doing so hot. Again, quick analysis right there, right off the bat. Again, completed work orders. How am I doing? Maintenance program is not only to automate, it’s to let you know how are you doing. Quick look at it. I have three on time. I have 18 not on time. Not doing so good. Again, same thing. You can tell how did I do this month, how am I doing for the week. Again, then a look at do I have high priority work orders. Do I have medium? Do I have low? Where am I? Also, what’s going on in my PMs? And these are just hotlinks to anywhere in the program and an updated status bar. Any changes, you can click on them and go to them. So again, any maintenance software will allow you to get a quick look at what’s going on.

In terms of your managing things in MicroMain, just a quick look at everything going on in your facility. One view, all your requested, open, hold. You can go to completed. You can have sub-statuses and types, all user-defined priorities, estimates of time, your start and due dates, brief description of your services, and then what are you working on. Which building, which property is it at? Easy-to-use filter is up here, so that I can filter by pretty much anything and manage this. Maybe I just want to see requested, and I just want to see only my requested PMs and apply.

Good CMMS, when you’re planning this, you want to know what you’re doing at a glance. You want to be able to filter and find things very quickly. You want to also be able to, as we talked about, go in and set up the data very easily. Site, properties, buildings, this is how you would set these things up. This is where I was talking about the planning. What is it you’re trying to set up? Do you have multiple built properties or campuses? Do you have multiple plants, and do they have multiple buildings at each plant?

Think this through before you start any CMMS or if you’re going to purchase, one does this CMMS you’re looking at allow me to divide the way I need to and set up my facilities? And then does it handle area assets like buildings, and grounds, and rooms, and office space and that, and equipment? Does it manage fleet? So again, this is what I’m talking about, making sure all the data is in there appropriately.

Can you put in all your people, and wage rates, and contractors, and suppliers and assign them to shifts? Can we manage parts? So again, I don’t want to belabor this, but as I was talking about, you want to make sure that the CMMS, all these stuff is thought out in advance, so that when you get in and start using it, and you go in to start trying to create work orders and PMs, the information is in there that you need, that makes it easy to use, and that in the end of the day, you get out the reports that you need.